Spore Creature Creator readies for launch

Spore, legendary game designer Will Wright’s epic video game masterpiece five years in the making, is in the home stretch, with a Sept. 7 U.S. launch date in sight. But Electronic Arts and Maxis are getting people primed now for some early Spore action by releasing the game’s Creature Creator on June 17.

Users will be able to download a free-trial version or pay for a complete $9.99 Creature Creator through www.spore.com, a new website that rolled out this week for the game. Your creations can eventually populate your Spore game this fall when it becomes available.

For those of you wondering what Spore is all about, it’s like a cosmic evolutionary version of SimCity, where you control a species from its cellular development all the way through its emergence as a highly evolved being capable of building civilizations and space travel. You’re basically the god of your little planet and beyond.

I got a chance to play with the Creature Creator yesterday and get a sense of how much control users will get. It’s actually quite fun, putting together your own whimsical creation. You work through various torsos, arms, eyes, legs, mouths and extra body parts, adding each component by just dragging it from a menu onto your character. After you apply a new body part, you can tweak it in numerous ways, lengthening some aspects, building up others, rotating them around on an axis.

There is so much freedom that you can create the most illogical and fantastic animals that probably have no right to exist in a truly evolved world. But that’s the fun. If you want a character with one eye and no legs, it’s all up to you. Know that your choices, however, determine how your character will eventually play. The legs you choose, for example, will have ratings on how well they run, dance or charge so you want to be strategic about how you create your beast.

After you make your creation, you’ll be able to save it to www.spore.com, where you can view other people’s animals in Sporepedia, a sort of collective menagerie for the Spore universe. You’ll also be able to upload shots or short videos of your character up to the web site or email them to friends. And you’ll be able to receive comments on your creations at your own MySpore Page.

Spore should have no shortage of takers this fall. But releasing the Creature Creator now is a savvy move that should whet people’s appetite even more for the game. I could just spend hours in the free trial just creating all manner of crazy animals.